Oslo mediator says Israeli leaders today lack Peres’s vision

One of the mediators who helped broker the 1993 Oslo Peace Accord remembers Shimon Peres as a charismatic leader who saw peace with the Palestinians as key to Israel’s future.

“He had the kind of visionary leadership that today’s generation of more introverted and narrow-sighted Israeli politicians really lack,” says Jan Egeland, who is now secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

Egeland, who was state secretary in Norway’s Foreign Ministry at the time, met Peres on several occasions during the top secret negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Oslo in the early 1990s.

“I found him very charismatic, a very strong personality,” Egeland tells The Associated Press by phone on Wednesday. “He spoke of peace with the Palestinians throughout the process in very visionary terms.”

Egeland says Peres, who was Israeli foreign minister 1992-1995, “loved the smoke and mirrors” of the covert talks in Oslo.

Egeland says he was impressed by Peres’ sense of humor and his talent as a speaker, both in public and in small group settings.

“But he was also a tough guy,” Egeland says, recalling the furious response he got after condemning the Israeli shelling of a UN refugee camp in southern Lebanon in 1996. Israel said the attack was a mistake and that its gunners had been aiming at nearby rocket launchers of Hezbollah guerrillas.

“I called it a massacre, and he got very angry with me,” Egeland says. “But not long after we were friends again.”

He calls Peres an “uncompromising defender of Israel in every sense,” but one who found it in Israel’s interest “to not create new generations of hatred” among its Palestinian and Arab neighbors.

“Today’s generation of Israeli leaders is not able to see that,” Egeland says. “And they and their children may live to regret it.”

— AP